I don't think that the 60s and 70s were an especially strange time for a young boy to be growing up. On the other hand, I was a pretty strange young boy, so my memory of the time may not be very accurate.
While other boys were burning off energy playing cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians, I was pretending to be the film stars I most admired: the great comedians. I have a vague recollection of waddling around with an imaginary cane when I was much younger, an odd response to a Chaplin film festival on the CBC.
By the time I was 11, I had seen all of the Marx Brothers' films (well, all the important ones) at least four or five times on television. Children are great mimics, so it was only natural that I would begin to act like Groucho, even as other children my age were beginning to act like , say, Humphrey Bogart or Audie Murphy.
Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), this led to many embarrassing situations. I can remember playing in the schoolyard with one of my friends when I was at the height of what I now affectionately refer to as my Groucho Period. The other boy had two guns, and offered me one.
"Let's play cops and robbers," he said, pushing the gun in my general direction.
Immediately, my back stooped in anticipation of the game. I stuck a pencil in my mouth, took it out again and replied, "Can't we play cops and shysters, instead? It seems a lot safer, not to mention more lucrative..."
If the other kid recognized the speeded-up pace of my voice, or its higher pitch, he didn't acknowledge it. "Here," he said, shoving the gun into my free hand. "I'll be the robber, you be the cop."
I looked dubiously at the weapon. I was about to say something especially clever when my friend shouted at the top of his lungs: "BANG! BANG!"
I dropped the gun and started running around in circles with what should have been an unmistakable gait. "I'm hit! I'm hit!" I cried. "Is there a doctor in the yard? Oh, mon dieu! Mon dieu! J'ai mal aux dents!"
No, I wasn't an especially popular child when I was growing up. Why do you ask?
Eventually, I got tired of Groucho. (It wasn't until much later that I became aware of how debauched the man was even as I emulated him. If I had known, I may have become a law clerk instead of...well, nobody's really sure what.) I spent some time after that playing W. C. Fields.
Children certainly can be fickle.
Not coincidentally, I discovered Fields at around the time that a retrospective of his films was being shown at a local repertory film theatre. This was to be a unique experience for a 14 year-old.
Typically, about half the seats were filled. There would be a large block of university students in the middle of the theatre. They were always exactly in the center, as if the seating arrangements had been part of a geometry assignment.
There were always between half a dozen and a dozen couples in various seats around the students, sharing varying degrees of intimacy. There was also a scattering of individuals, usually men between the ages of 20 and 30. Many of them wrote in tiny grey or brown notebooks.
Once there was an old man in a trenchcoat sitting in the back row of seats. He stayed for the first 10 minutes of the film, then left. I didn't understand his behaviour at the time, although the wisdom of age has suggested to me that he was expecting a very different kind of film.
(In hindsight, I am also amazed at my interest in W. C. Fields, who never hid the fact that he loathed children. I should have been terribly put off by this attitude, but I wasn't. I'm still not. Hmm...this column is turning out to be more revealing than I had intended...)
Of course, everybody in the theatre was at least four years older than I was, but that never seemed to matter. I saw eight films in three weeks, and talked like Fields for six months.
After that, I drifted for a while. I was fascinated by the intricate routines of Abbot and Costello, but I could never really do the pair justice because I couldn't interest anybody else in them. I tried to recapture the magic of Chaplin, but it just wasn't the same.
I guess I was growing up.
The last comedy hero of my youth was Woody Allen, who was just coming into his own when I was 15. Although I was getting too old to actually pretend to be him, his sense of the absurd remains a part of my writing style.
We cannot regain the past, and I am living too much in the dull, boring present to play the games of my youth. Still, every so often, from I don't know where, a little voice with a bushy black moustache goes off in my mind: "I'd rather go around with a cute blond than a bushy black moustache."
Hmm...perhaps we never entirely leave the things of our youth behind.
